Abstract

The Novels of Zakes Mda: New Voice Against Power?“

Derek Barker
(University of South Africa, Pretoria)

Writer, playwright, poet, academic, activist and polemicist Zakes Mda is one of the most prolific and exciting South African artists today. Since the demise of apartheid, he has published 6 novels: Ways of Dying (1995), She Plays with the Darkness (1995),  Melville 67 (1998), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), and The Whale Caller (2004). The approaches to Mda’s novels range widely. Judging merely from the proliferation of neologisms to describe his work, it is clearly no simple task to place him. The developing orthodoxy on Mda would appear to be a resounding endorsement of his novel writing with few detractors emerging thus far. The majority of readings would describe Mda’s work as bridging divides in a variety of ways. First, several readings view his novels as temporally transitional, pivoted on a present, drawing on the past, and projecting searchingly into the future. Second, some readings see his novels as transitional in a non-temporal sense, pivoted on the site of the traumatized individual or community, moving away from a fractured or fraught identity and violent past towards a form of redemption, healing or renaissance, though this promise is never a utopian one of pure transcendence. Third, yet others see the novels as bridging various gaps, whether between place and discourse, a variety of oppositions, binary terms, boundaries or modes of writing. Feminist approaches view his work positively as engaging in a critique of patriarchy. In addition, several Environment and Ecological approaches have on the whole made a positive assessment of this work, seeing it as transgressive and challenging in several important respects.